The Dark of Hot Springs Island

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Donnie Garcia, Jacob Hurst, Evan Peterson, Patrick Stuart
The Swordfish Islands
OSR

This 200 page adventure is a jam-packed hex crawl on an island full of factions and weirdness. Close attention to both usability and imagination have resulted in a must-have product. Magnificent. And it would have been even more magnificent if they had put in fewer words justifying the lack of monster stats and had put in monster stats.

Sometimes products come along that are clearly exceptional. A strong creator vision combined with something new. On the Adventure side of thing, Wilderlands was an early example. We might also list Stonehell, Rappan Athuk, Maze of the Blue Medusa. Something new, leveraged to see a vision implemented. This is one of those.

There’s an island, with sixteen hexes making it up. Each hex has three encounters in it. Some of those are minor and some of those are multi-room dungeons. The first one hundred pages of the booklet deals with that. Two pages summarize each hex and encounter. Then each hex gets a more in-depth description, with all of the detail of each hex fitting on a single page. Then there’s an expanded section for each major encounter that describes each one in more detail, generally a page or two. Think of it as providing the map and encounter key for those little dungeons on the isle. This section is cross-referenced to all hell and back. Factions, NPC’s, other hexs … if something is referenced a page number is given.

There are great summaries of the island, the hexes, the factions. Wonderful examples of how to actually USE the book, and tables to help generate rando things, like names for NPC creatures. The travel system outlined is simple and easy to use. The maps are clear and easy to read. I am a hard art critic, not liking much, but I must say the two-page spread of “Hot SPrings City” is something I would have framed it it were larger. (Joining the cutaway of the Starship Warden that hangs in my living room. I note that they are both very busy pieces.)

The second half of the book describes the factions and the major players, as well as monsters and magic items and tables, the usual appendix stuff. But … the factions. Man. This fucking shit is deep. There’s a group of ogres on the island, fighting a rebellion. The ogres get a one page write up. Then one more about the high priests influence, whats going on right now, and a major subplot. Then there are eight different major NPC”s presented, each with a little history/write and bullet point list of what they want and what they don’t want, followed up a few subplo/traits. And they are not just things to hack! And that’s just for ONE of the six major factions. It’s nucking futz!

Th creativity is off the charts. Not exactly gonzo … more Isle of Dread with a bit more “ancient elven magic” mixed in. More Dread than Dread, I think also. The environment for creative play is there, and then …

AReas are lightly keyed. Generally this means a map, some brief descriptions of the map, a table to determine what the general 411 of the map is, and then en encounter chart with they are doing. The ide being you have a place (the map and keys) and then roll to see what’s going on. Simplified, let’s say “turf war!” And then you roll for each room to populate the room and what activity they are engaged in. And your mind naturally related everything to “Turf War.” The system works very well. If you are in to building it on the fly. I’m not sure I am.

Oh, and there’s no monster stats, which is why there is no level rating. And there are seriously enough NPC’s to choke a horse.

I am a jerk-faced jerk. I insist on usability at the table. That’s my definition of “adventure”, which is what I review. I don’t want to prep an adventure. If I have to prep its a toolkit and, while I might be fine with a toolkit, I want to make sure I understand that’s what I’m buying.

Didn’t someone redo the maps in DCO? This thing needs someone to stat the damn thing. And make a one-page/one-sheet NPC summary list. (Ahum, with page number cross-references.) And maybe a rando generator for the rando stuff. (Although, I could probably do that in about 30 minutes, by hand, for the whole book, which doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Remember, I’m also a hypocrite.) Didn’t I rip Gardens of Ynn for the same thing? It IS pretty easy in Hot Springs to do that, easier than I recall Ynn being. This is almost certainly a case of me being unreasonable and citing something for the sake of citing it. The generation takes about a minute per “major area”, which seems fine to me. I also kind of wish that the travel rules were condensed and on the map. That would be a great final nod to usability.

The intro nodes that the island is a powderkeg and the party is the spark. I like that analogy for a good adventure. If you’ve got a lot going on then you can dump in the party and watch the place explode. Lots going on, and lots of threads to follow and exploit. That’s D&D.

If you’re still on the fence then you might also red my review of the Lapis Observatory. It is ONE of the locations on Hot Springs Island.

The Lapis Observatory

Yeah, the physical thing is pricy. But … really? For the amount of play you’re going to get out of this the price is trivial. Most price pressure, I think, revolves around the fear of getting ripped off. I don’t have a problem paying if I know it’s good … and this is one of those stake-in-the-ground products. You’re a fool for not having this.

This is $20 at DriveThru. There’s a 20-page sample available at the publishers site. It goes through how to use the book, and then page nine shows you main hex summary descriptions, with a few samples of the locations to be populated and the NPC faction data. It’s a great preview of the writing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/215340/The-Dark-of-Hot-Springs-Island?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 17 Comments

The Sinister Stone of Sakkara

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Alex Macris, Matthew Skail
Autarch
ACKs
Level 1

Over a millennium ago, when the borderlands were in the dark grip of the Zaharan Empire, the empire’s sorcerer-priests erected a profane temple to house the terrible artifact known as the Stone of Sakkara. Using the Stone, the sorcerer-priests could birth monsters and abominations with frightening ease and magically command the loyalty of chaotic creatures. The Stone brought its evil masters great power throughout the fell empire. In the centuries since the fall of Zahar, the Stone has lain dormant and forgotten. Now it has awakened, and warbands of beastmen have begun to gather sacrifices to power the Stone’s birthing pools again. Local farms and hamlets have been sacked and pillaged, and entire families have gone missing. The local legate has too few men to even patrol the border; he has none at all to hunt down the source of the evil. Adventurers are needed…

This eighty page adventure describes a keep on the borderlands along with some nearby ruins that has some mixed humanoid tribes in it, and an EHP. It’s the real deal, with a hundred room two-level dungeon and lots going on. It’s also dry and likes to hear itself talk about descriptions of normal bedrooms. It’s sad when you see the real deal obfuscated by verbosity.

You know the deal already. A keep on the borderlands, described in about thirty(!) pages. Then a two-level dungeon in about another thirty pages, and about thirty pages of appendix, etc. ACKS has domain rules, and as you would expect from those authors, the language used in this appears to be quite precise. No more sloppy usage of rounds and turns, etc. The authors seem to understand the theory and rules behind their own game. 🙂

The keep has loot, and named NPC’s and the possibility for a little intrigue. The same goes for the humanoids in the ruins. Factions are implied, there are empty rooms, the maps are large with some variety and a few loops. There’s are some notes on how the humanoids respond. The wanderers are engaged in some activities. Unusual treasure, like monster eggs, and hints for how monsters react based on the raction rolls. (You didn’t dump stat it, did you?!) Traps and tricks, such as mutation pools and the like are sprinkled throughout. Like I said, this is the real deal in terms of a dungeon.

And then they go and fuck it up by writing it down.

There are a few things wrong in this. Factions could be better outlined and/or noted on the map. Some sections don’t have great sections breaks … like a “travel to the ruins” paragraph which appears for all the world to be a part of the wandering monster descriptions. WHile NPC’ have page references for where they spend their time, a few more in the rumors, as well as the rumors being in voice would have been a good thing.

But that’s not the primary sins, not by a long shot. That’s all little nits. The major sin in this is the inability to describe a bedroom.

This is one of the most basic and fundamental skills in adventure writing. There’s been a lot of discussion about it online, not just from me. It’s not clear to me why people still can’t write a description for a bedroom. The basic question is: how much do you need to write when you are describing a bedroom?

Fundamentally, I believe the adventure must be usable at the table. The more information you put in a room description the harder you make it for the DM to actually run the room at the table. When the players open the door to the bedroom the DM must quickly scan the bedroom description and relay some information to the players. If the bedroom is novel-length then there will be quite some delay as the DM absorbs the information. Further, as the players explore the bedroom the DM must quickly find information in the bedrooms description and relay that back to the players.

I assert (as would many others, I believe) that this means the room description must be short. The DM has to be able to glance at them and quickly absorb the information in a second or so. Yeah, some rooms may be more complex, but that’s a formatting and layout issue. The key concept remains.

How can you accomplish this? BY LEAVING THE FUCK OUT THINGS THAT DON’T MATTER. Information can be implied, sure, and DOESNT MATTER is, of course, a bit subjective. Anything in the room that is normal can be implied, or referenced obliquely. The room description needs to concentrate on what makes THIS bedroom different .. relevant to the adventure. “A sumptuous appointed guest room.” May be all the description you need. In fact, you might title the room Sumptuous Guest Room and not offer a description at all. Or, maybe “with stained sheets and bloody manacles attached to the headboard.” We now have the image of a sumptuous guest bedroom with stained bedsheets and bloody manacles. THAT’S a good description. It implies things. It leaves room for the DM.

We don’t need to know the bed is a full size, made of cedar, with a chest of drawers with six knobs and full of X, Y, and Z. These sort of of exhaustive room description have little place. You’re not writing a novel; this is technical writing.

This adventure makes this mistake OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. It provides in-depth descriptions of the most mundane objects in every room, exhaustively listing content. It kills any imagination and comes off as dry. Every room is litke this, or close enough to generalize as every room anyway.

In town, rules are embedded in the room descriptions. The descriptions engage in explaining WHY things are, and give detailed room dimensions, duplicating the map. The emphasis on this mundanity detracts from the wonder. Common adjectives are used, like “huge” and “large,” BORING. English is a fabulously descriptive language, and that’s even before you start to twist it. But the word “huge” was chosen. Ug.

The rooms descriptions are a SLOG to get through. I’m not even sure a highlighter would fix it, they are so mixed up. The VAST majority of each rooms description is just not needed and clogs up the room, making it hard as fuck to scan. Yeah, it’s a decent little vanilla adventure. But I ain’t gonna slog it while running it. I’m going to pick something better oriented to the DM running it at the table.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages long. The last few pages give you a good example of ALL of the room/key description writing. I’ve also included four example below. The last example, in particular, I think exemplifies the damage done to a room by excessive description.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/156763/The-Sinister-Stone-of-Sakkara?affiliate_id=1892600

9. Stable-Barracks Block: See the Stable-Barracks Block Map. The stable-barracks block is 200’ long, 50’ wide, and 15’ tall. The block is built to house one company of 60 cavalry, along with four subalterns (platoon commanders) and one tribune (company commander), collectively spread across the block’s twelve rows.

Rows 1-11 are each sub-divided lengthwise into two 24’ wide sections. Each of these two sections consists of an inner living quarters (16’ wide, 9’ long, and 8’ tall) connected by wooden doors to outer stables (16’ wide, 15’ long, and 10’ tall) that open up to the outside. Ladders rise from the stables to hay-lofts (16’ wide, 9’ long, and 7’ tall) that sit above the living quarters. Each section ….

19p. Latrines: Marble and maple-wood benches are built over an underground water channel that flushes waste into the Krysivor River. Buckets near the latrines are furnished with sponges on sticks, with which the lavatory user can clean himself.

(guard room)
This 30’ wide and 20’ long room is guarded by six kobolds. The two largest guards (hp 4 each) are tormenting the smallest one (hp 1) by tossing its money pouch over its head, while the others enjoy the spectacle. The kobolds are considered Distracted for the purposes of being snuck up on (see ACKS p. 97-98). If the kobolds hear noise in room 2, they will end their game to investigate. If their morale breaks, the gang will flee to room 4. In addition to the guards, the room contains bedding for the kobolds, a round one- legged table, and a pile of gnawed animal bones. The kobolds carry 1d6 sp each, and the two toughest both carry 10 gp in small purses.

16. The Bloody Shore: This roughly oval cavern is about 80’ long and 50’ wide, with a vaulted, stalactite-riddled ceiling about 25’ above. A huge pillar of stone, 20’ thick, rises from the center of the cave to the ceiling. Everywhere else the cavern floor is covered with reddish “roots” that seem to grow up from the stone itself. If cut, the roots leak a thick sap the color and smell of blood. At the back of the cavern is a large pool of red fluid that looks and smells like thick blood. This is a birthing pool for abominations (see Appendix I, New Monsters, p. 66 and Appendix II, New Magic Items, p. 67). A single abomination lurks in the 5’ deep pool. It will only surface if someone enters or touches the birthing pool

(This is my (bad) edit:)
A mammoth column of stone, 20; thick, rises from the pool to the vaulted stalactite-riddled ceiling. The floow is covered with reddish “roots”, growing from the stone itself, which leak bloody sap when cut. A 5’ deep pool of blood contains an abomination that surfaces when someone touches/enters the pool.

Posted in Reviews | 69 Comments

(5e) Shadows of Forgotten Kings

Posted on July 21, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


Zzarchov Kowolski
ZERObarrier
5e
Level 3

The villages on the edge of the jungle used to be wealthy: they gathered fruits and exotic hardwoods from within the jungle and sold them as wines and furniture to regular merchant caravans in exchange for grains and other staples. But caravans do not make it through anymore. A handful of tattered survivors have made it back to the city and reported being assaulted by wave after wave of panthers that would attack, retreat, and attack again in replenished numbers. The merchant houses want their lucrative route back. The villages need grain and supplies; their people cannot live forever scavenging fruit and huddling by their hearths in fear every night. Tales lead deeper into the jungle – to the ruins of an ancient empire fallen to a terrible curse.

This 31 page adventure uses twelve pages to describe a ruined and forgotten city in the jungle. The encounters form a great neutral environment for the adventure, full of interesting things to get in to trouble with, and the final section of ruins contains a 90 minute timer. The text frequently forgets to get to the fucking point, and drives me crazy with “this room used to be”’s. Be it the writing, editing, or layout, someone fell down. Hard.

This is a pretty good forgotten jungle ruins city. It feels like one, and there’s lots to get in trouble with … without it feeling directed at the party. Each night a tree grows in the heart of the ruins. Fruit ripens and turns in to severed heads with sewn together kips, trying to scream. Eventually they burst and flies come swaming out. Which carry the plague. They fill the city from 15 minutes after dawn to sunset, when they die. Bursting the head before they do so naturally cause gore and maggots to come out of them. Ain’t that a stinker? That’s fucking AWESOME. Now that’s a what I call a curse! In another area there are fallen glass doors that, when you step over them, cause a magic mouth to appear and speak … which causes cursed panthers that roam the ruins to show up. But the next room is a hall of mirrors, which causes them to become disoriented. The entire thing is written in this very neutral manner. It’s not deck stacked against the party, it’s a natural environment that they can exploit, if they are smart enough.

A gold chain hanging from the ceiling may cause you to search the floor, to find what was hanging from it. IT MAKES SENSE. Someone thought for one than one second about the room, and it shows.A shadow demon who doesn’t want to be guarding anymore. Spells on clay tablets. A rosetta stone to crack the ancient language used throughout. Clues in one area to secrets in another. This adventure is CONSTRUCTED, a thing that few are.

And it’s weakened, overall, by its routine use of common sins. The number of fucking times I had to read “this room used to be …” and/or “its all dust now …” is beyond number. You know how I knew the room was a library? YOU CALLED THE ROOM “#12: Library”! And you follow up by telling me the room was once a library? USELESS. And it doe this sort of thing over and over again. It was once decorated with luxury, but now all is dust.

And voice! “Unlike whatever wooden furniture was once in the room, the club has not rotted to dust.”

Room entries bury information important to other rooms inside their own text. “The creatures in the numbered entries are treated like mummies” or”treat the undead like skeletons. When do reach the impacted rooms/text there’s no hint that they are mummies or skeletons. Bolding/etc for monster encounters or other important things is non-existent. “If you put the emperor’s body in this tomb then you get the following bonus.” Great! You know what would have been better? Putting “(#8b)” next to “emperors body” so we all know where it is. The relation of one area to another is great, and it doesn’t have to spelled out in the text, for clues relating to another area but a reference on where to find things is CRITICAL in an adventure like this, that tries to integrate the explanation of what’s going on inline with the text.

Speaking of what’s going, a gentle reminder: background information is ok … but not when you bury important things in there. Like DC checks. Which this adventure does repeatedly, thereby forcing me to read the backstory. LAME. Let me guess, Empire, Fallen, Curse, Evil, Corruptions, Gods. Did U get it right also?

I’m not a happy man this morning. I was hoping for better, 5e or no. There’s a decent mechanic for getting lost in the jungle and for adding some variety to the wanderers, but it’s plagued by a lack of proper editing. The starting village is plagued by pather attacks … but there is no data on that. The NPC (and wanderer) descriptions are lengthy. I don’t want to break up play at the table by reading a two paragraph NPC description before that NPC interacts with the party. I will read it once, a few hours beforehand, and I will glance down for a couple of seconds. That’s it. If it takes me longer than a couple of seconds to absorb then it’s no good. That’s how these things need to be written.

This isn’t garbage. It’s well constructed. A good wilderness followed by a good exploration area followed by a good dungeon. You just need to spend a lot of time with a highlighter going through it. I’m not going to do that. That’s supposed to be part of the value proposition that the designer/writer, editor, and production staff provide.

You know, bits of the writing remind me of that shitty Dungeon magazine room description of a trophy room that went on and on and ended with “but it was long ago looted and now nothing remains but dust.” It’s the same … cadence of words?

This is $7.50 at DriveThru. The last page shows you some of the Exploration system for the jungle, while the two before it show you the village NPC’s. Talk about wall of text!https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/243857/Shadows-of-Forgotten-Kings-5e?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | 8 Comments

The Vanilla Adventure

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Wind Lothamer
Knight Owl Games ( https://knightowlpublishing.com/)
OD&D
Level 1

As the players arrive in Boson Bay, it should be assumed that they know nothing of the particular culture of this area. If anything, they will have learned that Boson is a bastion of humanity in an untamed wilderness on the frontier edge of the world.

Vanilla doesn’t mean generic.

This 52 page adventure is a wilderness crawl with an inciting event: dragons begin a rampage and burn the town to the ground … and then move on to do the same elsewhere. This starts the party moving and, I guess, a motivation to stop the dragons. It is charming, brutal, winks at Tolkien, and has no Vanilla in it. It’s also single-column and a hot mess. But man … it just needs a little more …

The party is level one and new in town. Night two: dragons burn the town to the ground. Then orc slavers move in and capture the refugees. The burning down of the town is, I guess, supposed to get the party moving in the wilderness to other locations, by stumbling upon them/talking to refugees, and provide an overall goal: stopping the dragons from burning down EVERYTHING. Because that’s what they do. There’s a mechanic in this for which wilderness encounter the dragons burn down each day. The 9HD dragons. (1e was 8HD at Ancient? OD&D is different?) The party move around the wilderness, learn of new areas from others and from refugees, and eventually … well, I don’t know. As far as I can tell there’s only way to learn what is causing the trouble: talking to the orc slavers.

But fuck that, this thing is charming as hell. Footpad Ferd is a thief you can recruit, as is Borrmormere and Eric Snow. Mary Pippins is a halfling in their village you can recruit, as is Billbeaux. The elves are forced to stay in their forest because they wear silver collars that cause their heads to explode if they leave. There are 200 orc slavers in their camp. There’s a poly’d unicorn who has forgotten who she is, and a harpy, her mortal enemy, is after her. The Dorkenstone is in a mine that has awakened the dragons, deep in the caves, and you need to make a -10 save to not go mad. Also, the caves are full of dead bodies and some weird insect hybrid monsters. This place is FUCKING. MADEHOUSE. And I LUV it!

You can talk to just about everyone. The orc slavers. The humans at the various guard keeps. Poor dwarves, elves, halflings, outlying farms, the unicorns. Go ahead, talk to them, make a reaction roll. Try and recruit them to your side.

The mechanic of burning down the main down and then having the dragons burn down everything else is MAGNIFICENT. It gets the party moving and provides motivation for for role playing skeptical people (who haven’t been burnt down yet) and in recruiting folks to help fight the 9HD dragons. As with the best ODD, it seems to started with imagination first and ignoring the deriguour elements. Yeah, and ripping off Tolkien with funny names is a time-honored D&D tradition.

It’s not super clear how the party is aware of the Dorken stone. The map for the Dwarf dungeon is missing, there being just a blank page where it should be. (As is, I think, a temple map.) There’s no scale on the wilderness map in spite of checkins being called for “for each day in the wilderness.” It’s single column. The stat boxes are HUGE, and the writing needs to be tightened up a lot. This thing should come in at 15-20 pages instead of 60, with better formatting. Layout, and tighter editing. It goes out of its way to use vanilla elements and rip off Tolkien, and probably more I don’t recognize, given that John Snow NPC reference. (Dorken stone ripped off from Heavy Metal?)

But fuck me man, this thing BRINGS IT. Each encounter packs and delivers. Lots of creatures. Lots of HD. The encounters are almost entirely written for play at the table with little no bullshit trivia. It’s a fucking mess, a glorious glorious mess! Get the party moving. Let them talk to things. Give everyone a bunch of treasure to tempt the party. Pretty fucking simple formula.

Also, it has Giant Beavers. As is wont in OD&D. Even those adventures not set in Canada.

Want to play some Vanilla OD&D and have a good time? This thing is it.

This is $5 at Drive Thru. The preview is 12 pages, with the (charming) regional map on the last page. Check out those monster stat block on the pages before that! This writing is not very typical of the rest of the adventure, it being mostly prologue. The Dragons, on page eight, would be the most representative, I think, although most the sections are shorter than this.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/205032/The-Vanilla-Adventure?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 15 Comments

Tyranny of the Black Tower

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Extildepo
Verisimilitude Society Press
S&W
Levels 3-5

The village of Sacrabad is a wretched place. Dark rumors abound concerning its steward, “His Lordship” Nim Sheog, who rules the place through terror and cruelty. Merchants who have passed through Sacrabad tell tale of how chaos thrives while the good folk wallow in misery. Nim’s guard are no more than a well-paid gang of thugs, hired to enforce his relentless and often bizarre laws and what’s worse, they seem to be in league with a nearby band of goblins, The Yellow Fang, who are often left to terrorize the villagers without reprisal. It is rumored that Nim keeps the rightful and lawful lord of Sacrabad locked away in the dungeons of the keep, the ominous Black Tower. An imposing structure that once afforded the village protection, the Black Tower has become a symbol of tyranny. But there is hope on the horizon. Hope in the form of a secret society who conspire to rescue the rightful lord and overthrow Nim and his guard. Can our heroes champion the cause?

This 24 page adventure describes a small village and the wizard/manor tower of the evil rules, as well as the dungeons under it. It has some interesting ideas that could have deserved to have been developed more, like a village rebellion. Given a strong cleanup of the text you’d have a fairly standard adventure.

So, you’re standard repressed village. Corrupt guardsmen, thinly veiled alliance with the local goblins, evil wizard in a black tower on the hill overlooking town. There’s a small group of rebels in town. The party will get thrown in the dungeon under the tower on a trumped up charge, thus disposing of them, or they will push back when the guards push them, probably then making contact with the rebels. Whatever the reason, the party will end up in the dungeons (monsters) and tower (guards/wizard.)

I hate the village and I love the village all at the same time. It’s laid out in standard room/key format, which is a lousy way to describe a social setting like a village. The entries tend to the long side, making information hard to find in each. What’s worse, it’s mostly just the same old usual tropes. These things should be written to cut fast. Get in and out fast; a couple of words of description and focus on what’s relevant to the adventure rather than the trivia and mundanity. But …. It’s also got a great hand-drawn village map. It’s great for one main reason: it complements the rebellion thing that’s going on in the village. There are a couple of resistors to the mages rule and they could make contact with the party. The map perfectly compliments sneaking around at night. Fields, ravines, rises, hedgerows, tree copses … all it’s missing are some guard notations and maybe a patrol path and you’ve have a perfect map to support some great intrigue play. The text is not great in that regard; the plots could be called out more and so on. But it definitely leads to the DM imagining sneaking around the village, torchlight, and shiving guards on patrol and pulling them behind hedgerows, WW2 style.

It’s also got a pretty good emphasis on … zero-levels! The bulk of the guardsmen are zeros, with a 2nd level lieutenant or so here and there. Finally, a village in which all of the guards are not 10th levels fighters!

The tower, proper, has the upper levels that house the wizard and his troops and the lower levels that house a more typical dungeon, and in which the party might be thrown in to. There’s a wizard to free down there, who could be an ally if nursed back to health, as well as some goblins, sentenced to death, who could be allies also if you can put up with them being goblins … not outright betrayal but rather some low level stuff like stealing. It’s a decent little “wizards dungeon”, not awfully special but an effort is made with the encounters.

The writing though, is very weak. A page of background. A page of hooks (which should have been formatted better) and lots of loose text in the descriptions. “If the referee wishes …” is a good example. Why would that be put there? It’s padding. Be direct in your fucking writing, people! It comes out as conversational and indirect. It obfuscates the text and makes it hard to find the relevant bits. Non-trivial facts expressed with evocative words.

At one point dwarfs find a walkway of suspicious design … but nothing more is said of it. Uh. What? Why would you not tell us?

This needed an editor. And not one of this shitty copy editors. That crap’s mostly useless. (Except, of course, for my reviews, which desperately need one. 🙂 Someone to cut the weasel words, flag the common adjectives, and tells the writer to switch to active voice. The bons are good, if you can slog it through.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, most of which are useless. The last page gets closest to the real writing. Note the “hooked” section on the left. The paragraph writing could have been better organized with bullets, or some such, instead of mixing everything in to the text. The first key is not quite typical, but note the mixed location data and lack of getting to the point.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/245819/Tyranny-of-the-Black-Tower?affiliate_id=1892600

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To Bring Down the Sky

Posted on July 14, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Benjamin Gibson
Coldlight Press
5e/Pathfinder/1e
Level 4

The overcast sky and dusty road are working in concert to make for a truly dismal day. It’s almost a relief to hear something out of the ordinary, like a wailing cry of panic and a harsh, coughing roar. Looking up to the clouds, a thin human figure hurtles down, chased by a savage beast with reptilian wings. But looking up past the two is an even stranger sight…three mighty isles loom out of clouds, impossible and yet somehow real.

This 49 page adventure, with about four actual adventure pages, takes place on three islands floating in the sky. The party travels there to recharge a feather of mass fly, and ends with fighting an quantum ogre. It’s terse, got good encounters, has a couple of interesting product concepts, and delivers on the “everything you need for one night” promise that so many other products fail at.

Normally, a 49 page adventure with four pages of content would arise my ire. This is PWYW, with a price of $1. I can pay a $1 for four pages. But wait, there’s more! This promises everything I need for a one shot/one night of adventuring. So many products do that. I’m pretty sure I’ve yet to see one deliver. Except this one. All of those other pages are support material. Blank character sheets. Party handouts. Pre-gens. Gear lists. A one page primer on how to play. 25 pages of battle maps. Some printable mini’s. I’d have a hard time imaging how someone could do better than this.

Then the adventure does something else interesting. There’s a DCC adventure that you can use when someone dies. You go off to the underworld to save their soul, if I recall. Blades Against Death. You pull out the adventure when someone dies. At that time I called it a whole new genre, the SItuational Adventure. You pull it out when a certain situation arises. I’m not sure I’ve seen another one in that genre since I reviewed Blades in 2013. Until now. This adventure gives you a magic feather that has, essentially, a mass fly spell. If your party needs to get a long distance, fast, then you can whip this one out. At the end they will have an item that can take them a long distance quickly.

Of the four pages of actual adventure you might consider two of them background. You read those ahead of time, once. They provide some background, a general overview, some clarification of wider goals, the preamble, hook of the adventure, and so on. Then there are two pages that are used during play, one a map and one a key. The map, isometric (I love isometrics for larger/complex places! DL1 to the rescue!) contains a few other pieces of information as well; some personality overviews and some stats.

Those personalities overviews are something Ben has done before/frequently, and I love them. He gives an NPC a three word description. The apprentice wizard on the isle is helpful, curios, and panicky. The old caretaker couple is dour, scared, and nostalgic. These perfectly communicate what you need to know to run the NPC and integrate them in to the adventure in a fun way. Panicky and curios gives you ideas. Nostalgic and scared gives you ideas.

The adventure uses a lot of techniques that I’m willing to call The Ben Style. Centered around a one or two pager, or a series of them, these short NPC descriptions, terse stat blocks and key descriptions, and some background information that is generally read-once orientation. It’s a great format. He also does things like give adventure follow-on suggestions, social mind maps for NPC interactions(Yeah!), and gives location reference in the text descriptions so you know what/where to look for things.

The encounters, proper, are interesting as well. The halfing couple are trapped in their house, with wyverns in the barn … along with the calf they don’t want to leave behind. A bridge pulls away from the main island. Wyverns lie sleeping, gorged. Bathing an artifact in the quantum ogres blood recharges it. They are interesting and make sense.

There ARE a few things that annoy me. The bridge that pulls away, it does that 30 minutes after the players arrive. That could have used some bolding or otherwise some sort of standout text instead of it being in the key description. Likewise, the monster descriptions are a little light. There’s at least one sentence/thing I don’t understand at all: “Pass to second isle exit is behind secret door.” Huh? The isle is connected to the main one by ropes … how can there be a second exit?

Is this one of the Best? I would say it has done as much as you can with with the format of the one/two pager. A little light on monsters descriptions, or evocative text. But … it’s a one pager. There’s a limit, I think, to the amount that can be accomplished with this format, and I think Ben has pretty much reached it. This is, absolutely, an acceptable level of adventure writing. If you were looking for an adventure and picked this up you would be satisfied, both with the adventure and with the claims it makes. It’s a good, solid performer. This goes against my absurd desire for every adventure to be an evocative tour-de-force, which is stupid. This is a good adventure. Ben would be my go to for 5e/Pathfinder content, at this point.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a current suggested price of $1. The preview shows you the main four pages of the adventure, all of the actual content. How can you ask for more than that?
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/244681/One-Session-Kit-K3-To-Bring-Down-the-Sky?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 4 Comments

Grudge Immortal

Posted on July 11, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Emanuele Galletto
Rooster Games
LotFP

The Year is 1564. A group of Western explorers reach Japan on board Portuguese vessels, lured by the promise of adventure, fame, and riches. What awaits them on the ghastly island of Takashima, however, is a much darker tale…

This 40 page adventure details a small Japanese island with a very bad spirit on it. Good theming can’t disguise the verbosity and formatting issues though. This could easily be half as long, if not less, and be much better for it. It’s a good horror adventure, and those are few and far between. But man, it’s a textbook example of an adventure making sense to the author, but needing the hand of a good editor to cut Cut CUT.

While in a small Japanese village the players hear some rumors. Some primitive villagers on a nearby island have silver with weird runes on them, there are pirates on the island, the island is a Heavenly Ark, left behind during the Age of Gods, and/or there’s a legendary sword on the island. This brings the party to the island. The first eight pages are full of background, historical and fictional, which condenses down to “you’re in a village and hear some rumors”, with it assumed the party follows up on. The actual content in this section is pretty weak, consisting mostly of just the half-column of rumors. Everything else should have been stuck in an appendix to safely ignore.

Achieving the island, it’s full of massacre site after massacre site with great horror imagery. A ruined fishing village full of the bodies of women and children cut down. The elders hut on a hill has some bodies torn apart, impaled, in a wholly different way than the rest of the village, and the headman is at the bottom of a ladder, his neck broken from a fall. Elsewhere on the island there a woman’s body stuffed in to a sacred well. In the ark proper there are the bodies of children in various states of decay mired in muck in a small dungeon room. It’s creepy as fuck, and a slow burn until it explodes in action. It’s got some great imagery, the dungeon proper has a lot for the players to interact with and get in to trouble with, and feels for all the world like both Japanese horror AND a deadly LotFP adventure. That kind of “the only winning is not playing” high character stakes shit that Raggi adventure have had. Good horror, the slow build with creepy as fuck shit, is hard to find in adventures. This is good horror.

The adventure is also a total pain in the ass. It engages in LENGTHY descriptions of things with seemingly on the very basics effort made to organize itself. So while you get major section headings like “Village” or “Pirate Base” you also get facts mixed in to the text, all stream of consciousness style. Mixed in to the pirate base description it tells us that at night you can hear gunshots from the base all over the island. Well, fuck man. That’s important. That’s not something that you bury in the text of one location. “Wilderness encounter 45 of 134: A great visage of God hangs over this site and can be seen everywhere, pointing a big red arrow downward.” The gunshots are perhaps the most glaring example of this lack of thought, but it shows up everywhere in the adventure. The formatting of large chunks of text is just plain WRONG. Important things are mixed up in the text of trivia. You have to read a full column or more to get a grip on whats going on in a location. General descriptions should be up front, with the most obvious things, with follow up text explaining more. Summaries, indents, bullets, bolding … use the full power of word processor and layout to bring clarity to the adventure text. This is just verbose stream of consciousness writing. Sure, the layout is nice, but who cares if its a pain to run?

Here’s the description of one of the rooms in the dungeon/Ark:
“Partially submerged within the sludge on the floor are the rotten corpses of eighteen male children, each in a different state of decay and swarming with arhropods. The most recent has probably been dead for less than three weeks, and the oldest is little more than a skeleton. All of them had their neck broken; a careful examination of the more intact corps- es reveals they were tied or restrained.

These are Tokiko’s failed experiments, the children kidnapped by the villagers and killed for Antoku’s soul to possess them. This process has never been successful: the young child-emperor has retained some of his sanity and purposefully resists the process. Tokiko doesn’t know this, or perhaps she refuses to acknowledge it.”

Note that the second paragraph is all fluff/history. Irrelevant. We’re actually told this information three other places in the adventure, iirc. The first paragraph is good, but, perhaps, formatted sloppily. The last sentence, maybe the last two, could be broken out in to another paragraph or via bullets or something. It’s not such a big deal in this room description, but as the descriptions get longer and the DM text does also, it becomes critically important to make the data easily transferred to the DM during a quick text scan/read at the table. It does this over and over again. You’re not writing fluff. You’re writing a tool to be used at the table. It CONTAINS fluff, those evocative descriptions and so on, but its primary orientation must be use at the table.

I like the adventure. Nice slow burn horror with dire consequences. That’s rare enough. But man, I can’t stand the format. This morning, it’s not worth it to me to go all highlighter on it. Let’s all remember though that I have very high standards; this thing is certainly interesting and its cons may be more manageable/acceptable to a wide range of folks.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. It shows you all of that background data on Japan, historical and fictional, and the small section on the second-to-last-page that has the rumors/hooks. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/230052/Grudge-Immortal?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments

The Scenario from Ontario

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Kiel Chenier & Zzarchov Kowloski
Self published
NGR/LotFP
Low levels

(These are the results from a writing contest, with little extra polish.)

This 49 page canadian-themed adventure has two scenarios: Sugar Shack Slaughter and Maple Witch of the Beaver Wars. They each take up about half the book. Both are set in the pseudohistory of the 17th century of LotFP. They both ooze a lot of flavor, local and otherwise, with quite good encounters. And they both could have used more editing/layout, with the first being better than the second, but not great either. The first is essentially a monster hunt while the second has just a bit more roleplay, although I would say both are very roleplay heavy.

The first scenario is more developed than the second, with the second being more in the line of free form ideas in paragraph form with some general large section headings. The first dows more with whitespace, indents, bullets, and so on to make the information more readily available to find during play. The second has long paragraph that has three NPC’s in it, describing all three of them. Bullet points or paragraph breaks, perhaps with bolding, would have done wonder to make it more accessible and less like a wall of text … which major sections of it are.

Nitpicking at the first, the hex map is a little light to read hex boundaries, and the wandering and movement stuff really should have been included on the hex page also, to put everything together instead of spread out over multiple pages. It does this in multiple places, and could have been formatted better to keep important things, like what the syrup farm owner knows, all on one page. But …

It DOES have a nice little section NPC’s. The core concepts of both are great and there are PACKED with flavor. Furt traders, one sick, will trade some beaver pelt for a cure … but not all of them! That’s a great roleplay scene, between the party and them and between the two of them. “Jaque! Give them more so I will be healed! No! We need that money!”

The monster hunt has a 50hd 600hp blob monster that, if killed, reforms, That’s pretty nice! Finding your way to a cursed tree and a trapped spirit to be banished finishes things up. Along the way are complications from the natives, and government/business conflicts with bribes. Maple syrup, beaver pelts, witches, native tribes, fur traders … all its missing are some mounties and hockey players for the most canadian thing ever written.

(Speaking of, Canada needs some more tourist traps. Mounties, first peoples, hockey players, fur traders, all walking around in the same fake forts.)

The hooks present are pretty blah … except for one. It’s mostly just hired jobs and missing relatives. But, a central point of the first adventure is a missing maple syrup mogul. One hook has you searching for her … but for revenge! She has wronged you and by god you’ll not let her get off so easy as to have a monster take her! I love the logic of it! Great hook!
My, what a worthless review I’ve written. If you’ve ever wondered why I usually just reviewone adventure in multi-paks, this is it. I do a terrible job.

Anyway, they are both very flavorful and evocative. The encounters in each are top notch, memorable without trying to be over the top. And they both FEEL like Canadian adventures. And they both have serious usability issues. Whil the first, the monster hunt, has better formatting, it’s still quite lengthy, the sort that digest with large margins gives you, and the second is just free form text, IMO.

This is $4.50 at DriveThru. The preview is worthless, giving you no idea of the writing in each section.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/239661/The-Scenario-from-Ontario?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 19 Comments

The Beholder Contracts

Posted on July 7, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By David Whiteland
Fantasy Chronicles #3
AD&D
Level 3

Eight pages of four column tiny font from an obscure Irish(!) rpg magazine from the 80’s that is ALSO a favorite of Kent? Sign me up! I finally tracked down a print copy of the magazine … well, two. The first was lost in the mail and the second came in from Uganda. I know. The things I do for love. We’ll pass on the usual wall of text and usability criteria for this one and just accept the limitations of four column tiny font in a magazine. That part blows.

But

I often talk about digging through boxes of junk adventures at cons and stumbling across a masterpiece. A hidden gem. That’s what this is.

This is a good adventure. Adventure outline? Something like that. Imagine something like B2. We’ll call that a normal and/or standard adventure. Location, keys, etc. Then there’s those BS plot adventures. Lengthy, scenes, a series of locations, etc. Something like Stonehell, or other one-pagers, might be seen as an outline of the standard B2 type adventure. It tries to keep flavor and what’s important while minimizing the rest, all in an abbreviated page count. (I’m straining the example a bit, B2 is pretty abbreviated already.) Beholder Contracts might be seen as an abbreviated version of the plot adventure. It provides a general outline, specifics to add color, and lets you, the DM fill in the rest. You get more than the usual plot adventure because it leaves things out. By providing an outline it allows for more room to color outside the lines, avoiding the typical railroad elements. We might think of it as a small number of places for the players to visit all connected by some threads.

While healing, the party is approached by a henchman of wizard 1. He wants the party to go recover a lute stolen by a musician who was then captured by wizard 2. Wizard 2 knows nothing, but finds a reference to the lute pointing to some barrows. Visiting the barrows turns up a ghost of the musician. Seems wizard 1 steals peoples eyes … and wants to steal the parties eyes for what they saw in Wizard 2’s home. A visit to wizard 1 is in order …

And absolutely every little bit of that outline I just provided is WONDERFUL. You’re resting in a little monk grotto/gardens. The flavor is well communicated in the text. Wizard 2’s abode is great … high on top of a mountain … with a great view. Not a meany, just a wizard. The ghost? Not actually. Half alive and half dead, he plays on the lute to partially revive his corpse each day … before the effect begins to wear off. The wizards? Flavorful as FUCK. Bob the all-seeing collects eyes. Wizard 2 is a lightning. Their stats break ALL the rules. Treat as level 6, but only with access to level 1 spells. Except for lightning at level 12. They FEEL like idiosyncratic wizards … which is exactly how the fuck NPC wizards SHOULD feel. The PHB is for the players, dummy!

The supporting material is good. General maps, showing just enough detail to ground the DM. Stat blocks and magic items are easy to find. There’s an abstracted overland travel map that concentrates on JUST what the DM needs to run it. It’s 120 miles from a to b, add 20 if you are taking roads. Roll on the hills wandering chart in the DMG once a day. As Shao Kahn would say … Excellent!

The writing style is quite evocative. It’s sticky. It’s all free-form paragraph descriptions, not typical room/key. For most people writing I would suggest room/key and the one or two sentence evocative description. But that is not the only way, and I would never suggest it is. It’s just the easiest way for most people, especially amateurs. But you can do anything you want as long as its effective. I’m fond of quoting the description for Old Bay, the retired hill giant who LOVES giant crab legs. Once read you will never forget him. The descriptions here are more akin to that. Sticky. Plus, the amount of detail to be kept in the head is relatively short for the DM. At just four double-sided pages, the DM need only read a column or so of text to keep in their head, and they can run the nights game of just that. There’s probably enough content for, I don’t know … three or four sessions? Thus you read tonights section, it gets cemented, and you run it. It’s all general descriptions, the vibe and feel of a place, with the rest left up to the DM. It’s a perfect amount, and type, of content.

The NPC”s and places are all memorable. The magic items are great and unique. There’s a natural progression to the adventure that doesn’t really railroad players but still has a kind of plot going on.

Having said all of that … this will require a highlighter. Some bits are more important than others and they are all mixed in. Plus, you’re not gonna find this for sale. Haha suckers! I got it and you don’t! (Which is why I tend to not review older things and I’m shoving this in to a weekend “free for all” slot.) Some kind person should get the authors permission to rewrite it, keeping the spirit and flavor while ditching the limitations of four-column tiny-font magazine layout limitations. Whitespace, bolding, boxes and indents … Some layout would be most of what it takes to turn this thing in to a 9 or 10.

Bah! My google art foo fails me! There’s an illustration of a water nymph standing in a pool of water, clutching a garment to her, with adventurers next to her with a spear, I think. Classic D&D art, maybe in the style of those old turn of the century styles that everyone grabs for free for their OSR stuff. This reminds me of that. The feel. The richness of it. I’ve seen 2e is be good ONCE. When it is it feels like classic free-form OD&D. Rich beyond belief. That’s what this adventure is, rich beyond words.

I feel like someone I know has reformatted other older adventures that were kind of a mess. Maybe they would like to get the authors permission and bring this one in a more usable form also, so the world can enjoy it?

Posted in Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 20 Comments

The Palace of the King Under the Water

Posted on July 4, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By W. R. Beatty
Rosethorn Publishing
S&W
Levels …? Mid to high?

Long forgotten by the people of the Rosewood Highlands, these ruins, now called Blackfalls Hall, have become the palace of the mysterious King Under the Water. […] What does the King Under the Water want? What is he hiding? Who will brave the depths of Blackfalls Hall to discover its secrets and treasures?

This 59 page adventures describes a multi-level complex of humanoids dominated by an evil king. With about 120 rooms, it is the real deal when it comes to multi-level dungeons. Fleshed out and fully realized, it has great variety and a … continuity? to it. Also, the editor was on LSD. I want to say something like “this is a nightmare of epic proportions” but that would be a great exaggeration. It’s disorganized with the DM text being all over the place, making it hard to parse at the table. For some reason I’m reminded of Dark Tower … great, but not simple to use. Or maybe Yrchyn the Tyrant from Usherwood … fully realized.

This thing don’t fuck around. It has a short background on page four and starts the keys on page five. Page 45 ends the keys and starts with the maps, monsters, magic items, AND A MONSTER SUMMARY SHEET!!!! The entire thing might have two pages of background info; that half page at the beginning and one page at the end describing rumors, hooks, and factions. The font is small and the information DENSE. It’s been a long long time since something like this popped by.

By my count there are seven levels, with varied map styles. Dungeons, grottos, outdoor cliff dwellings with an isometric view to help you understand it … perfect. The maps are Dyson. I know a lot of people love Dyson maps but I’m cooler on them. The ones I’ve seen generally tend to be small, almost like lair maps, with varying degrees of interesting features. Some of these are larger, to the point of being full on exploratory maps with many loops. Magic items contain a decent amount of uniques, especially with swords. For example, Bitter Root, the longsword, +2 can only penetrate magical armor, useless against non-magical armor though still cuts flesh.

Multiple prisoners to rescue, factions and machinations, up to and including the False King and the True King of the halls. Garran Ocar, High Priest of the Flood makes an appearance. Who the fuck is he? Hell if I know, but that name, oh man! Well, yes, I do know, he was drowned and raised by the true king. That’s the sort of detail that just oozes flavor. An old bitter ghost has cursed the place and now long-time residents are obsessed with birds (a part of it used to be a temple to a bird god.) This opens up some bird theming for the goblins, including riding giant vultures in places … like a cave mouth overlooking a high cliff, and a shamen that may jump out of window to be at one with the bird gods. There’s a kind of interconnectedness that runs throughout the place, with multiple themes. PERFECT for D&D exploration! Players love that kind of shit, and so do I as a DM.
Now, let’s talk about why this wonderful piece of work would be a nightmare to run. Room 1:

“The path up the cliff side is winding and treacherous, following a series of switchbacks, ending at the bottom of a series of buildings clinging to the cliffs on the western side of the waterfall. The entrance is about 50’ above the great pool below. The door here is thick oak, reinforced with iron bands and painted red and blue (the royal plumage of the Birdmen).”

That’s not a bad initial description. It even establishes some mythology with the red/blue stuff. We’ll give this paragraph MOSTLY a pass, since it’s really “the outside.”

Paragraph two …

“The door is locked. Inside the 15×20 foot room are 7 Goblin Guards and a Bird Shaman, called “The Sky Watch” by the other denizens. Normally they simply sit at tables playing dice or complaining. If alerted, one will climb the spindly winding stairs to the next levels to alert the garrison guard while the remaining six stand against the wall on either side of the door to ambush anyone who comes through while the Shaman casts darkness which covers the whole room.”

I’m gonna be an ass here. The locked door sentence belongs in the first paragraph. That describes the exterior and the lock is the exterior. In fact, that entire first paragraph could/should be a preamble before the keys start, but, whatever. Anyway, locked door goes OUTSIDE, where the information on outside is. Once INSIDE The room then you can start with those details.

Room dimensions in text are almost always bullshit. That’s what the map is for. Start strong, with the first thing. “7 goblin guard and a bird shamen dice & complain at a table. If alerted the Sky Watch will …” That’s direct. It’s targeted at play.

THEN comes the third paragraph …

“Each Goblin wears leather armor with a blue waterdrop symbol crudely painted on the chest, fights with a shortsword and a dagger and has 1d4 sp and 1d10 brilliantly colored bird feathers in a leather belt pouch. The Bird Shaman is covered head to toe in blue and red feathers. In addition to his spells, he wields the Staff of the Air (Stinking Cloud 2x/day, Predict Weather 3x/day, Air Blast 4x/day). Air Blast pushes an ogre sized volume of air (3’x5’x8’) at an extremely rapid speed, pushing up to 600 pounds of weight 4d6 feet (save for half distance). Air Blast does no damage.”

It is at this point I think the description is really off the rails. There’s really two things going on here. First is the description. Blue waterdrop and covered head to toe. Very nice, Probably belongs after the “complain at a table” since it’s something the party sees immediately. The leather/shortsword stuff, as well as the Staff of Air, probably belong in the monster stats, which is paragraph four, or even putting the staff in the magic item appendix, maybe with a page number reference. “Staff of Air (p44)”

(paragraph four)
Goblin Guards (7): hp 2,2,5,7,4,8
Bird Shaman: hp 9
Spells: Fly, Feather Fall,
Bird Form (limited polymorph self)

This sort of muddling of information happens not only within room but between rooms as well. Information from one room is referenced in another, obliquely. “They will release their pet.” pet? What pet? Oh, that’s in a different keyed entry. A reference to that entry, “rm 7b”, would help immensely. This is pervasive throughout the adventure, even if it can be excused a bit in the Cliff Dwellings section because of the way the buildings kind of all run together.

This is a great multi-level dungeon. I just wish it were edited better for use at the table. It’s a hard sell to slog through things. Something like 15 adventures made my Best Of list in the last year. That’s more than one a month. Why would I suffer? It’s time like these I have No Regerts.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. The last half shows the keys, with room on, the bird shamen, on page four. Check out those last three pages for a great example of what you’re getting. A great preview.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/240471/Blackfalls-Hall-The-Palace-of-the-King-Under-the-Water?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 6, No Regerts, Reviews | 7 Comments